Monday, 21 October 2013

Blinking leds with 555 timer

Intro:
I was looking for something that could make some leds blinking, but my head always ended up with some Arduino stuff.
I had to move my challenge to the next level, forget about the helpful Arduino and move to the real electronic way!
After few hours of research I came up with the 555 timer solution, simple, clean and cheap.

Items:

555 Timer

Capacitor ( try to get a few from 10 to 100 uF )

Resistor

Leds

Battery

Wiring:

The diagram above is the simplest one that I found in the internet, it shows how to connect the 3 resistors, capacitor and led.

Tweaking:

Here we go, now we have our flashing system but you have to tweak it a little bit because the flashing delay is too higher or lower for your project.

Change the capacitor with something higher than 100 uF to increase the delay or something lower to decrease the delay.

Here an example:

100 uF = 2 flash per seconds

10 uF = 10 flash per seconds

These are just "fake" information, but you can have an idea which capacitor you have to use for your project!

The brightness of the led can be changed by using the current resistor on R3, maybe 1K is too higher for your type of light.

The flashing delay can be adjust by changing the R1 and R2 with lowers values, but be careful, better have a look on the internet and calculate the right ones!